Friday Five: Tips for Running a Successful Twitter Contest

There are countless ways to keep consumers engaged with your brand on your social media channels – and people keep coming up with new ways every day. One popular tactic to engage followers on Twitter is running a contest or giveaway. Twitter contests can augment follower acquisition, increase awareness of the channel, boost website traffic and even sales. But before you go diving headfirst into the land of Twitter contests, there are a few things to keep in mind. Here are some tips to help you run a successful Twitter campaign.

1. Read Twitter’s Official Contest Guidelines

Twitter has a help page dedicated to helping those looking to run a contest on its platform. These guidelines deliver terrific ideas for ways to play fair, stay within legal parameters, and still emerge with a successful campaign at the end. Additionally, it can’t hurt to brush up on the official Twitter Rules prior to launching a contest. Also, make sure to post the official contest rules or guidelines on a website for entrants to view.

2. Clearly Define Your Contest Parameters and Rules

When running a Twitter contest, you’ll want to make the rules for entry as clear as possible. Consider what Twitter users must do in order to enter the contest. This might include following your brand, @ mentioning your brand’s handle, using a designated hashtag, or including a link to a designated landing page. Keep in mind that you want the parameters to be simple enough that people can easily enter with little effort, but high enough that you still receive value from the contest. Be sure to include details such as when the contest will begin and end, how many times and at what frequency people can enter the contest without being disqualified, how the winner(s) will be chosen, what the winner(s) will receive, how they will be notified of winning, and how they will receive the winnings.

3. Establish Your Measurement Procedures

Consistent campaign measuring and reporting is an integral part of any social media campaign, but it is especially important with Twitter contests. Consider paid options such as Simply Measured for tracking purposes, as public Twitter searches can be labor intensive and Twitter search isn’t always reliable for collecting large amounts of data. Whatever monitoring tool you decide to use, be sure to establish a measurement procedure before the contest launches and establish benchmarks, or you might also miss out on crucial data.

4. Choose Your Winner(s); Be Transparent

The moment we’ve all been waiting for – the announcement of the winner(s) of your Twitter contest! Highly engaged followers will be anticipating this moment, so be sure to make it clear exactly when the announcement will be taking place. Make the announcement public, and indicate that the contest has closed. Most importantly, thank your followers for their participation.

5. Optimize Your Data

You thought you were done now? Not so fast. You’ve got all this data left over from your Twitter contest, so put it to use! Run through the data and find out who the most engaged or influential contest participants were – even if they didn’t win. Whose entry into the contest or retweets about the contest sparked more entries? Who positively engaged with the brand about the contest? Take time to connect with them individually in order to ensure their continued channel engagement and loyalty. By doing so, you can prolong the contest’s promotional efforts for your brand by leveraging the influence of other Twitter users. Maintaining a strong and engaged follower network isn’t easy, and requires some work, so be prepared to follow up with anyone who has remaining questions about the contest.

Now let’s hear from you! Have you run a Twitter contest before? Was it a success? What other tips would you give to those who are considering running a Twitter contest?